Hybrid Image Encryption Technique for Securing Color Images Transmitted Over Cloud Networks
International journal of intelligent engineering and systems · 2023
Information is an asset that profoundly affects every aspect of our lives and requires protection from malicious attacks.Although storing it in a repository can safeguard this information, techniques to maintain confidentiality during transmission over communication networks are essential.Due to the advent of digital technologies and easy communication channels, most of the information now exists in images or other multimedia formats.To safeguard such formats, it is crucial to encrypt information before transmitting it over a network.Encryption transforms the data such that only the intended recipients can reconstruct it.Image encryption is a widely researched topic and various methods have been proposed.As traditional methods often fail to provide adequate protection, advanced encryption standards are currently being investigated.Chaos-based techniques are strong contenders for cryptography because they ensure confidentiality, nonperiodicity, and randomness and are easy to implement.Therefore, they are frequently utilized and can be combined with other methods to bolster protection.In this study, we developed a hybrid image-encryption technique that leverages hyperchaotic maps and elliptic-curve cryptography to guard data against security vulnerabilities.The proposed method achieves an average entropy information value of 7.99%, indicating its resilience to entropy attacks.Furthermore, it showed a net pixel change rate of over 99% for all the test images acquired from the final diffusion stage.It also recorded peak security values of 0.9897, 0.9848, and 0.9676 in the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions, respectively.Overall, the scheme demonstrated a satisfactory performance across nearly all evaluation criteria.